


end of eras

by finkpishnets



Category: The Haunting of Hill House (TV 2018)
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Post-Canon, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-28
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-09 10:46:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18636589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finkpishnets/pseuds/finkpishnets
Summary: Luke goes home.





	end of eras

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lesblams](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesblams/gifts).



> i recklessly gave my tumblr pals the chance to call me out on fics i've casually promised them over the years and then forgotten about entirely, and sammie asked for this (which is all her fault in the first place) and asked me to make her cry. i don't think this'll do _that_ but it ain't gonna keep you cheery, either. crain twin emotions, who'd have 'em?
> 
> set post-series, and as happy as i could make it, i guess?

  
  
**o.**

 

When he dreams of Hill House, they’re always children.

Nellie’s eyes wide with innocence, a stuffed animal clutched in one hand and Luke’s fingers in the other, the whole world an adventure they still don’t understand well enough to fear.

(Or—

That’s not true. He remembers fear. Crippling, blood-chilling fear. But it’s outweighed by adrenaline and imagination, and Nellie’s hand in his, _always in his_ , and somehow it never sinks into his bones.

Not the way it would.

Not the way it _did_.)

Theo’s in the kitchen, making cocoa with her walkman blasting, and he can hear Shirley on the floor above, footsteps marking a path to Stevie’s room, quickly because there’s so much they all want to do and summer can’t last forever. 

Even in his dreams, Luke knows that much.

“What do you want to do today?” Nellie asks, blinking at him with all the seriousness her six-year-old self can muster. It’s a serious question, after all.

“I don’t know,” Luke says, voice a quiet little thing and glasses sliding down his nose. So young and naive and yet more himself than he ever grew up to be.

“We could go to your treehouse?” Nellie suggests, and Luke shakes his head.

“No,” he says. “No, not today. Let’s play outside.”

Nellie’s face lights up because outside means chase and make-believe; tigers and fairies and whole new worlds at the tips of their fingers. Outside means being able to _breathe_.

“Yes,” she says, and squeezes his hand.

For a moment it’s perfect.

“Oh,” she says, and they’re stood at the front door, heavy wood propped open as far as their little arms can manage, “it’s raining.”

“We’ll play outside tomorrow,” Luke says, an earnest promise he’s sure he was able to keep, once.

“Tomorrow,” Nellie says, wistfully, her eyes a little too old and a little too sad.

When Luke wakes, he can still feel the ghost of tiny fingers around his.

 

(It’s the only dream he remembers, and it’s always the same.)

 

 

  


**i.**

 

Theo and Trish move to DC, two beautiful children without Crain blood but with sharp, brittle survivors spirits they can all recognize under their wing.

Theo doesn’t cry when she shows him the guardianship papers, so Luke wraps her in his arms and cries enough for the both of them until the last of her walls crack and she spills hope and dread in the space between, voice breaking when it finally gives out. 

“You’re gonna be such a good mom,” he says when she’s worn herself thin, and knows she can feel the truth of it against the palm of her hand.

“Yeah,” she says, pride radiating from every pore, her path diverging, “I think I am.”

They haven’t lived in the same place since they were children, but the going-away barbecue Shirley hosts in send-off feels like the beginning of an end all the same, and if Luke needs to take a moment away to breathe he knows his siblings understand.

“Call me,” Theo says, catching his arm as Trish begins to pile the last of their things in the trunk and Kevin and Shirley start fussing with leftovers for the kids. “I’m not kidding.”

“I’ll call you, like, _tomorrow_ to find out the name of that show Trish was talking about, come on.”

“Not what I meant,” Theo says, and then grins. “Okay, yeah, I definitely meant that too, but…you know what I’m saying. _Call me_. Any time.”

If it were Steve or Shirley saying it, he knows he’d bulk. Shame and regret and pity twisting into something that tries not to be resentful and fails no matter how thankful he is. It’s not, though; it’s Theo with her PhD and her pitiless voice and her eyes that untangle the soul and see out the other side. 

He’s never been able to lie to Theo.

No one has.

“I will,” he promises, and thinks it’s enough that he means it.

 

 

  


**ii.**

 

Steve and Leigh stay in L.A., and Eleanor grows up in the suburban sunshine. She’s a firecracker, his niece, so much like the aunt she never met; Luke catches Steve watching her sometimes, his usual pride and adoration tinted in memory, and knows the feeling.

He loves Lea so much, but sometimes when the wind lifts her laugh in a certain way or her eyebrow cocks in attitude, it’s like he can’t breathe. 

She doesn’t look like Nell — too blonde and too tan and no Crain blood in her veins to keep her weighted down — but she has her aunt’s kindness and boldness and spirit, and in the end it’s as painful as it is amazing.

“ _God_ ,” Steve says sometimes, seeing it too, and Luke squeezes his eyes shut until he laughs.

“Ghosts?” he asks because ghosts are memories and because it’s true, and because it isn’t true at all, not really, not to them.

“No,” Steve says, gripping Luke’s shoulder, and looking more at peace than Luke can ever remember seeing him. “Just life.”

Luke’s not sure they’ll ever be as acquainted with life as they are with death, but maybe it’s enough that they’re trying.

 

 

  


**iii.**

 

Living isn’t always easy. 

The first few years are spent on his sobriety. Meetings and therapists and nights spent on the phone with the first of his siblings to pick up, huddled under blankets and borrowing the strength in their voice as an anchor when he can’t find his own. 

After a while it gets…never easier, but smoother. Less all encompassing. His anxieties take a back seat, and the world keeps spinning.

He gets a degree, takes several jobs he tolerates and then one he likes. He meets and drifts away from people, letting things take their course. 

He never marries, but he falls in and out of love until it sticks, and they’re both content with that. If he never tells his story in its completion then that’s accepted, too. Accepted and understood and never pushed for, and Luke finds another level of love in that.

They move out of L.A., to Colorado, then Washington, finally settling in Oregon and the kind of slow living that had once seemed the most terrifying thing in the world.

He knows more about terror now, but he thinks maybe knowing can take the edge out of a thing.

Either way, he lives and he lives and he lives.

 

 

  


**o.**

 

He dreams and he’s holding Nellie’s hand.

“It’s raining,” she says, and Luke frowns through his glasses at the open window.

“No it’s not,” he says, but Nellie shakes her head and suddenly Luke’s wrong and it is, the sky heavy and dark, rain falling like a curtain around the house.

It’s not bad. Luke’s never hated the rain, even if it is inconvenient.

Nellie looks upset, though, so Luke squeezes her hand.

“Tomorrow,” he says, and Nellie sighs and nods and her eyes are too old and too sad, and Luke knows it’s time to wake up.

 

 

  


**iv.**

 

“A grandma!” Shirley says, hyperventilating down the end of a phone line as he lets her wear herself out. “I’m going to be a grandma!”

Luke presses his smile against the receiver. “I heard the first time,” he says when she finally takes a breath. “Congrats.”

“Shut up,” Shirley says, because she’ll always know when he’s teasing. “I’m so _old_.”

She goes still then, and Luke knows they’re both thinking about their mom, about Nell. 

“I’m so happy for you guys,” Luke says, and if Shirley’s laugh sounds closer to a sob then he doesn’t call it out, just grabs at the easily found threads of joy and tugs. “This is amazing.”

“Yeah,” Shirley says. “It really is.”

“How’s Kevin coping?” he asks, and grins when Shirley groans.

“God, don’t,” she says, and then talks for an hour, looping back to the same stories and speaking almost entirely in exclamation points. 

Luke gets comfy and pays attention.

 

 

  


**v.**

 

He’s so used to death being sudden that he doesn’t know how to handle the slow route.

It’s a gift and it’s torture, and he’s not ready to be alone but he hates this, too, the long crawl of drawn out, suffocating goodbyes.

In the end it’s just him and the hospital bills and too many flowers for his sitting room. 

Still, he lives and he lives and he lives, carrying the weight of new hurt with the familiar old.

He wonders how it’s possible to miss _home_ so much more after so much time.

 

 

  


**o.**

 

He dreams of Hill House, and she’s Nell, not Nellie, their mother’s old dress swaying around her knees in the breeze from an open window, rain falling against the pane and across Nell’s cheeks when the wind blows a certain way.

When she turns it’s in surprise. 

“Luke,” she says slowly, like it’s taken her a moment to place him but now she has she’s certain and pleased and a little wary.

He wants to ask why, but he can’t speak.

“Oh, Luke,” she says, and curves the palm of her hand against his cheek. He leans into it, and it’s not warm but it’s _something_. 

A memory, maybe.

Outside, the rain starts to fall harder.

 

 

  


**vi.**

 

He wakes up and understands.

 

 

  


**vii.**

 

The house doesn’t look the same. 

Its bones are still there, backed against the sky and pressed close by sprawling trees, but…

Maybe it’s time. Maybe he never truly remembered it to begin with, too young or too scared or too grief-ridden. Maybe the house ages and grows and twists like a body, swelling and sagging and breaking down until it buckles under it’s own weight.

Hill House has always been alive. Luke knows that as well as the Crain’s that left before him.

He can’t see anyone inside, but he knows they’re there. He can feel them in the shadows, breathing with the walls, and once upon a time that would have terrified him, but he knows who’s waiting in the dark now.

He sits on the third step up, and blinks against the dust. 

He’s not old — not really, not yet — but he’s not young, either.

Still.

Years of treating his body like a shell before it had grown and strengthened and formed into something able to take the hit were always going to take their toll.

His doctor hadn’t been able to find anything, but—

_But._

When the pain hits his chest, he’s not surprised.

 

 

  


**o.**

 

“Luke,” she says, hand against his heart, and there’s raindrops on her cheeks.

Except—

They aren’t raindrops, they’re tears, and she’s smiling through them even as sadness tugs at the corners of her lips.

“Nellie,” he says, and his voice sounds more like his own then it has in a lifetime.

“You shouldn’t have come,” she says, and he can feel the truth and the lie of it in his veins. She means it but she doesn’t more and that’s enough.

“It was time,” he says, and she presses her forehead to his and her tears fall until they feel like his own. She doesn’t ask what for, so he says it anyway, for her and for himself and for the other parts of his heart that breathe within these walls. “It was time for me to come home.”

“This place was never your home,” she says, and he frowns.

“No,” he says, because _of course_ it wasn’t. He thought she knew. “You are.”

“ _Luke_ ,” she says, and holds him close as he wakes up.

 

 

  


**i.**

 

He opens his eyes.

“It’s raining,” Nell says, and her hand holds his tightly.

“So?” he says, because he’s not a child and he’s not an old man.

Nell’s eyes spark with joy and mischief and something close enough to life.

“So,” she agrees.

They open the doors together.

Outside, the rain soaks through to their bones.

Nell’s still holding his hand, and he’s not young and he’s not old, and he’s finally _home_.

“Forever,” she says, and he’s not dreaming.   
  


**Author's Note:**

> come hang out with me on [tumblr]().


End file.
